The "Heartbleed" flaw in Internet security is as critical as the name implies and wider spread than first believed.

Warnings about the danger exposed early this week reached widening circles on Thursday, with everyone from website operators and bank officials to Internet surfers and workers who tele-commute being told their data could be in danger.

"Heartbleed is a catastrophic bug in OpenSSL," well-known computer security specialist Bruce Schneier said in a post at his schneier.com website.

OpenSSL is a commonly used software platform for encrypted transactions at "https" websites t...

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All of these continual references to Hitler, Nazis, the Gestapo, fascism, brownshirts, or the Holocaust serve no purpose other than to use disingenuous fear-mongering tactics to try to sway the public to an otherwise indefensible point of view. It's right out of the Atwater-Rove playbook on how to smear your opponents or an opposing opinion when you have nothing legitimate to say.

The terms "fascist", "Nazi", and "Holocaust" get thrown around far too loosely by people at both ends of the political spectrum, and it insults the memory of those that had to live through (or died because of) the policies of a truly fascist regime.

Somewhat off topic, but during the first season of the excellent crime show, "The Closer," the head investigator lady and her team are looking into the death of a young Mexican girl who had been raped. The girl lived with her mother, who was the housekeeper for a wealthy white family.

Long story short, it turned out that the privileged and odious teenaged son had raped her (the girl, who was twelve, didn't understand what "being his girlfriend" meant, and when she objected, he forced her. She then fell down a staircase and died).To give his son a chance to escape, the father insisted that he had been having a "relationship" with the girl and copped to the accidental death. The son and his doting mom fled to Mexico.

Brenda (The Closer) had frozen the family's assets and the Federales brought the arrogant fuck kid (who had gotten the previous housekeeper preggers--and the family just had her deported) into a Mexican police station, where upon the boy refused to return to the US. However, Brenda told him that she would unfreeze the family assets if he told her what had happened. He smugly confessed.

Too bad for him that the Federales spoke English, and that Mexican law allows the prosecution of anyone who murders a Mexican anywhere in the world. So Brenda told the kid he could stay in Mexico--in prison. It was a rather satisfying episode!